My questions so far: 1/ ROI - how much of a difference can good EM make as opposed to bad EM or no EM? Should I not rather focus on improving my product? 2/ What is the low hanging fruit? 3/ What are some of the tools I should be using? If my payment management is in Strip, how do I integrate it with the CRM? [answer: https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/crm]
Improving your product's important, but you have keep in mind that the product is not the business, and a 10% improvement to your product likely won't have anywhere near the effect that a 10% improvement in your marketing will.
2) Sending a single welcome email with first steps that can be used as a reference, sending "trial ending" emails to remind people that their trial as running out (and offering an extension, usually), and 30-90 days after expiry emails offering a trial extension in case they got busy (happens very frequently) or asking for info why they didn't decide to go with your product. Anything above that, you want to start getting into tracking user lifecycle events and customizing your onboarding to that, and in fact, once you start doing that, you can start improving those low-hanging fruit emails as well.
3) You can use something as simple as Mailchimp to something as powerful as Salesforce. It really depends on what part of your funnel you want to focus on.
One thing people don't tend to get about email marketing before diving in is that there's no "one thing" that's email marketing. There's newsletter marketing, where you capture prospects, there's onboarding, there's "regular update" emails, there's winback emails, there's retention emails. Email's just a tool, really, and it's applicable and nearly all levels of marketing.
I've really gotten into this kind of stuff over the past few years, and if you still have questions, I'd be happy to chat with you about it. Email's in my profile.
It's a tedious task that needs regular attention and skills to ensure you're not underperforming, or identify low hanging fruits like old blog posts that are performing well and can be leveraged to get more sales or signups.
A marketing automation tool allows you to centralize marketing emails as well as transactional emails in one thing, decoupled. Your product emits events with some attributes, and the tool react to it.
Examples with "user_registered" and "user_ordered" events:
- confirmation of order (at "user_ordered")
- ask for a review (at "user_ordered" + 3 days)
- welcome process (drip emails starting at "user_registered")
- wake up campaigns (no "user_ordered" events since 1 month)
- sending a notice for a new product Z to users having bought product X or product Y (segment on users having "user_ordered" for product_id IN (product X id or product Y id))
- ... there is no limit to imagination, I love that!
Shameless plug if I may, I'd like to know your interests in such a tool: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5J5BuP_dEfXPEtXV0...
Email marketing is just one tool that's used in a specific way depending on your industry, product, and customer base.
Always focus on improving the product, but don't do this in a vacuum. You need to ask customers and potential customers and customers of competitors about their problems.
If no to any of the above, then I would just do manual outreach. Get a feel for the customers. Iterate the product. Find product-market fit. At some point you'll naturally wonder if you can scale the successful emails you're sending, and that's when email automation comes into play.